AI talent
Chief AI Officer and AI Programme Director
Owns the enterprise AI portfolio: sequencing, funding, governance, delivery and the operating model around it.
The role
What the job actually is.
This is a portfolio role, not a project one. It decides what is funded and in what order, holds the governance and delivery functions to account, and builds the operating model that lets a second and third capability ship faster than the first. Most of the value is in sequencing and in stopping: an organisation with eleven pilots and no operating model is worse off than one with two capabilities in a process. The person has to hold a board conversation and a build-team conversation in the same week without changing the story between them.
What we screen for
The questions that separate the field.
Asked by someone who has built the thing, and designed to catch this role's specific failure rather than to confirm a general impression.
- Whether they have run a portfolio rather than a project, and what the funding mechanism was.
- Whether they can hold a board and a build team in the same week. Ask for both versions of one decision.
- What they stopped, and how they made stopping acceptable.
- What the operating model looked like by the time they left, not at the point they arrived.
The common mis-hire
The one you have probably already made.
A transformation executive with a strategy deck and nothing in production. The narrative is fluent, the roadmap is credible, and eighteen months later the estate contains pilots rather than capabilities.
In the estate
Where this role works, and what we screen it against.
The layers this family works at, lit. These are the tools we screen against. Naming one says we can test for it, not that we have delivered on it.
Evaluation and observability
Spans every layer. Without it a system is shipped on impressions.
Experience and delivery
Copilots and agents inside a business process, and the interaction design that makes an uncertain system usable.
- SAP AI Core and Joule
Orchestration and agents
Where an agent's steps, tools and state are defined, and where its failures are caught before a user meets them.
Models
The models themselves, and the platforms an enterprise hosts them through.
Data and grounding
What the model is grounded in, and the integration work that gets enterprise data to where it can reach it.
Systems you already run
The seven platform desks Yallo staffs. Almost no AI work is greenfield; it lands here.
Governance, risk and safety
Spans every layer. Named as what governance roles are screened against; what any of them obliges is your counsel's call.
- EU AI Act
- ISO/IEC 42001
- ISO/IEC 23894
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework
- OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications
Seniority
What changes between mid, senior and lead.
The grade is a description of what the person owns, not a band. Rates come with the shortlist.
- Mid
- Not a grade this role is filled at. The portfolio limb is the job, and it does not exist below senior.
- Senior
- Runs the portfolio and the governance against a mandate someone else has set.
- Lead
- Sets the mandate, owns the funding model and the operating model, and is accountable at board level for what does and does not proceed.
In a programme
When this role is needed, and what blocks it.
Before the first capability, or the first capability sets the pattern by accident. The dependency is a funding mechanism rather than a technology decision, and the failure mode is appointing the role once several pilots are already running, which makes the first job a clean-up rather than a direction.
Adjacent
The roles this one is confused with.
Ask
Send the brief, get a screened Chief AI Officer shortlist.
Tell us the programme, the stack and the timeline.